Saturday, 25 February 2017

CHAPTER 2: THE ROEHM AFFAIR

“THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES” – THE
popular phrase for the bloodbath that began on June 28 and lasted until July 3,
1934- saw Adolf Hitler wreck the SA militia and order the shooting of its
chief, Ernst Roehm, the man who, since 1919, had been Hitler’s sponsor and
faithful second in command. Long before Hitler decided to “burn out this
pestilential boil,” as he later labelled the SA leadership, he had built up the
SS. A black shirted crew of tough body guards well experienced in street
fighting, the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich,
was conceived as an “elite guard” and was originally subordinate to the SA.
Himmler’s dislike of Roehm, his superior and a homosexual, was an open secret.
While the SA had skyrocketed from 300,000 members in January 1933 to three
million eleven months later, the SS, which had begun with only three hundred
members in 1929, had grown to just fifty thousand by 1933. Himmler’s hopes for
expanding the SS rested on keeping Roehm’s ambitions in check. For his part,
Roehm sought to replace the Reichschwer,
or regular army, with his own SA. It was a dangerous desire. Roehm had never
understood, as Hitler did, the need to avoid conflict and rivalry with the
military, or any act that might provoke the army to move against the Nazi
Party. Roehm didn’t understand why his brown shirted bully boys, so effective at
spreading terror and intimidation when the Nazis were out of power, were now
thought, after January 1933,to be an
embarrassment and an obstacle. Inner-party rivalry grew more heated and bitter.
Himmler, together with Heydrich and Goring, used every opportunity and means to
drive a wedge between Hitler and Roehm, even going so far as to accuse Roehm,
as Hitler’s only serious potential rival, of planning a coup against the
Fuhrer. At long last, Hitler was forced to conclude that the SA, unruly and
undisciplined, headed by a man whose objectives threatened his own, simply had
to go. Operation Kolibri (German for “hummingbird”) was on.

On the night of June 28, when Hitler flew
to Munich, he was accompanied by his usual entourage and a small cohort of SS
officers. He had alerted Adolf Wagner, the Bavarian minister of the interior,
to have the local SS armed and ready. The Reichschwer,
under the command of Colonel Werner von Fritsch, clandestinely provided arms,
munitions, and transportation. Himmler, Heydrich, and Goring were put in charge
of Berlin. Some weeks before, Hitler had secretly picked Roehm’s successor, an
obedient SA leader named Victor Lutze. The SA, Hitler would explain later, had
been planning a putsch and had to be stopped by force. In fact, Hitler’s
overthrow was the furthest thing from Roehm’s mind. Officially the SA was on
vacation, dispersed all over the country. Roehm and his close followers were
staying at the idyllic Pension Hanselbauer on Lake Wiessee, near Munich. A
meeting between Hitler and Roehm was to take place on July 1 – a last effort to
iron out the problems arising from Roehm’s stubborn insistence on replacing the
regular army with SA. Unaware of the web of intrigue spun by his Nazi
opponents, Roehm was looking forward to a reconciliation with his old brother
in arms.

But once Hitler arrived at the Munich
“Brown House,” he arrested the first two SA lieutenants he met, and ordered
Sepp Dietrich, the commander of his bodyguard regiment, to round up all the SA
men he could find and take them to Stadelheim prison. Then the Fuhrer’s
motorcade proceeded hurriedly to the Pension Hanselbauer in the Bavarian
countryside. Without warning, the SS troopers stormed the hotel. SA Lieutenant
Edmund Heines, a Nazi Party stalwart whom Hitler especially disliked, was
caught in bed with his young chauffeur. When Heines protested, an SS man
smashed his face. Heines was arrested on the spot, handcuffed, and, together
with Roehm and five other leaders, transported to Stadelheim, now overcrowded
with bruised, uncomprehending SA men. The five, including such party veterans
as Hans Peter von Heydebreck and Colonel Count Hans Joachim von
Spreti-Weilbach, Roehm’s aide de camp, were executed the same day, together
with several SA subordinates who never understood what was happening. Roehm,
dazed and shaken was left in a solitary cell.

Meanwhile, the swift purge, orchestrated by
Heydrich, was taking its toll in Berlin and other German cities. About three
hundred people were killed, many in no way connected with the SA but hated or
feared by someone in the Nazi bureaucracy. Among them Gregor Strasser,a veteran
Nazi theoretician, suspected of leftist leanings. He was thrown in a prison
cell, tortured, and then riddled with bullets. The last Chancellor before
Hitler assumed that office, General Kurt von Schleicher, was shot down at his
home “while trying to escape arrest.”

Throughout Germany, old scores were
settled. For the first time the Third Reich showed its true face. In Munich,
Hitler ordered the SA regulars to the “Brown House,” screaming that they were
al “homosexual pigs,” though he well knew that only a few in Roehm’s immediate
entourage were homosexual. In Berlin, Goring greeted the stunned SA lieutenants
with abuse, also calling them “homosexual pigs.”

So far, Ernst Roehm had been spared. We
will never know whether Hitler was beset by any last minute regrets about his
oldest comrade. In any case, on July 1, an SS officer entered Roehm’s prison
cell, handed him a revolver, and said, “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. You
have a choice.” Roehm is supposed to have answered, “Let Adolf do it himself.
I’m not going to do his job.” Later that same day, Roehm was finally executed
by two SS hitmen, led by Theodor Eicke, later picked by Himmler to organise the
proliferating concentration camps. The corpses of the Stadelheim victims were
taken away in a butcher’s tin lined truck.

Ernst Roehm was born in Munich on November
28, 1887, of a respected family of civil servants. Unlike other Nazi leaders,
he appears to have had a peaceful childhood. In his rambling autobiography he
describes his father as a “stern patriot of the old vintage,” and raves about
his mother, to whom he remained dedicated all his life. From the start, he
wanted to be a soldier.

At nineteen, Roehm gained entrance to the
Tenth Regiment, named after Prince Ludwig, the Bavarian ruler. Until the end of
his life he remained an admirer of all kings, especially those of the Bavarian
branch. After he entered Germany’s War College, he quickly rose in the ranks and
was detailed to supervise the training programs for new recruits. His success
was enormous. He loved turning country bumpkins into professional warriors. He
also exhibited administrative abilities, becoming chairman of a committee that
resolved grievances among officers. Yet his real vocation, as he insisted
repeatedly, was to train “raw country youngsters.”

From early on, he displayed an irreverent
attitude toward those higher in rank, a trait that got him in trouble
throughout his career.Later he would
observe that “an intelligent, thinking subordinate is the natural enemy of his
superior.” Roehm often went out of his way to let his superiors know that he
considered them inept. His ill-concealed contempt did not endear him to the
army’s high command. During his entire career Roehm battled incessantly with
his higher-ups, and quickly gained a reputation for being unnecessarily
abrasive.

Like many other Germans of his generation,
Roehm welcomed the First World War. “With joyous pride, Germany enters the greatest
war in her history,” he wrote. He was never given to boasting about his career
at the front, and he tended to dismiss the fact that half his nose was shot
off, leaving him scarred for life. He went back to the front until his last
injury, around 1916 or 1917, made him unfit for combat. His talent for
organisation must have been apparent, because he won the admiration of Erich
Ludendorff, the notoriously difficult administrative genius of the German army.

After the defeat in 1918, Roehm, like many
other soldiers, joined one of the dozens of post-war paramilitary
organisations. But, unlike others, Roehm continued to engage in secret work for
the army, storing clandestine weapons at a cache in Bavaria. Still, he was
drifting and he knew it. He longed to live in a truly modern state modelled
after the military. Roehm was convinced that a technological monarchy was the
answer to Germany’s problems. He was a man in search of a king.

Roehm met his liege in 1919, when he gave a
bewildered thirty year old veteran with an odd little moustache his first job.
They had much in common. Both had been front line fighters and both had been
wounded (Hitler had been gassed). Roehm quickly became Hitler’s most trusted
friend. (When talking to Roehm, Hitler used the familiar form of address.
Except for his chauffeurs and valets, no one else in Hitler’s entourage will
ever be so honoured by such a gesture of intimacy- not even Martin Bormann, the
“Watchdog of the Inner Chamber.”) Four years after their first meeting, Roehm took
part in the famous abortive Beer Hall Putsch. Many of the conspirators were
killed; Hitler was shot in the left arm, tried, and sentenced to one year in
prison. Incarceration provided quit and leisure. Treated more like a celebrity
than a convict, Hitler began composing his political manifesto, Mein Kampf. Roehm, too, was briefly
jailed, but the court placed him on probation.

Hitler’s admiration for Roehm’s
organisational skills grew as Roehm built up the SA. The Fuhrer’s need for
Roehm was so great that he steadily ignored every report of Roehm’s homosexual
activities. In 1925, however, they quarrelled – though not over Roehm’s sexual
preferences- and Roehm resigned from the SA. Roehm soon found himself embroiled
in an embarrassing lawsuit against Herrmann Siegesmund, a Berlin Hustler, who
had somehow gotten hold of several incriminating letters. In the end, the suit
was dismissed, but the damaging letters were to haunt him for the rest of his
life. (In 1932 the letters were leaked to the press and proved to be a boon to
his enemies within the Nazi Party. More than his homosexuality, it was Roehm’s
indiscretion and lack of discipline that angered many of his comrades. In a
letter to Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann wrote to express his outrage: “I have
nothing against Roehm as a person. As far as I’m concerned, a man can fancy
elephants in Indochina and Kangaroos in Australia- I couldn’t care less.” But
Bormann was offended by the spectacle of “the most prominent SA commander….
Slandering and denouncing people [in his letters] in this blatant manner.”)

In his autobiography, Roehm defended
himself without apology. “Nobody can call me a puritan… A so-called `immoral`
man who does something competently means more to me than a so-called `morally`
clean person who is inefficient.” For Roehm, a left-wing storm trooper who
fought well was preferable to a fearful Fascist- a sentiment he often voiced
when ordering his SA subordinates to recruit among the Communists. Or, put
another way, a brave homosexual was to be preferred to a cowardly heterosexual.
Roehm believed that in order to be a “real fighter,” a leader must remain a
bachelor. His admiration for Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, Napoleon,
Prince Eugene of Saxony, and King Karl II of Sweden was unbounded: “One can
barely imagine that they yielded to feminine wiles.” Indeed, the last three are
known to have been bisexual or homosexual. He complained vigorously about the
smear campaigns against him. “It appears to me to defy all laws of common sense
if the state takes it upon itself to regulate the private lives of human beings
or tries to redirect these lives toward other goals.” He detested the
“incredible prudishness” that motivated the “guttersnipes” attacking him.

Finally, Roehm left Germany and accepted a
job training the Bolivian army. From La Paz, feeling banished and isolated, he
poured out his heart to a gay Berlin physician and astrologer, Dr Karl Hellmuth
Heimsoth. He sorely missed Berlin’s pleasures. His attempts to convert several
Bolivians to his special type of eros went unrewarded, but he added in a letter
to a protégé of Heimsoth’s, “I will continue bravely to try and spread some
culture here, probably without success.”

In 1929 a party squabble threatened to tear
the SA apart; a rebel group under Captain Walter Stennes had started to mutiny.
Stennes taunted Roehm’s stalwarts at a rally, dismissing them as “sissies in
frilly underwear who couldn’t order their boys around.” As the rebellion grew
more serious, Hitler urged his old friend to return to Germany. Roehm did not
hesitate to heed his Fuhrer’s call, and his armed squads quickly and ruthlessly
suppressed the mutineers. The “sissies,” as it turned out, knew how to use
their revolvers.

Roehm was made chief of the SA and went on
to preside over its expansion, recruiting thousands of adoring, unsophisticated
young men. He kept their loyalty until the end. According to his recollections
–and even his most venomous enemies within the Nazi Party never disputed this-
he never began a sexual relationship with anyone under his command. Indeed,
Roehm was thirty seven years old when he had sex with another man for the first
time. It must have taken a certain amount of bravado for Roehm to conduct his
affairs as casually as he did. Whether this was a sign of indifference and
courage or just plain foolhardiness is hard to know. What is certain is that
such unabashed behaviour earned him the unending hatred of Himmler and
Heydrich, both still nominally under Roehm’s command.

For about one year, Hitler kept faith with
his second in command. When complaints about the blatantly open homosexual
behaviour of Roehm and his henchmen continued to reach him, Hitler issued an
official statement: “Some people expect SA commanders… to take decisions on
these matters, which belong purely to the private. I reject this presumption
categorically…. [The SA] is not an institute for the moral education of genteel
young ladies, but a formation of seasoned fighters. The sole purpose of any
inquiry must be to ascertain whether or not the SA officer… is performing his
official duties…. His private life cannot be an object of scrutiny unless it
conflicts with basic principles of National Socialist ideology.”

Grateful for Hitler’s support, Roehm
responded by issuing an order of the day that flaunted his homosexuality and
widened the gap between himself and his enemies: “I take advantage of the
prevalence of these… excrescences of prudishness… to make it clear that the
German Revolution has been won not by philistines, bigots, and sermonisers, but
by revolutionary fighters…. It is the SA’s task not to keep watch on the
attire, complexion, and chastity of others, but to haul Germany to its feet by
dint of their free and revolutionary fighting spirit. I therefore forbid all
officers and men of the SA and SS to employ their activities in this field and
allow themselves to become the stooges of perverse moral aesthetes….”

Roehm’s bold declaration must have
infuriated Himmler, whose loathing of homosexuals knew no bounds. But he could
not act against Roehm without Hitler’s permission- and that permission would
not be forthcoming until the Fuhrer was persuaded that Roehm was no longer
needed. And until his 1933 takeover, Hitler had little choice but to rely upon
his SA captain. Roehm’s storm troopers had provided a spigot of terror that
Hitler had turned on and off as the occasion demanded. The SA had cleared a
path to power. By the end of 1933, Hitler had succeeded brilliantly: most
important government jobs had been filled by Nazi Party members; the expulsion
of non-Nazis from key positions in the judiciary, the civil service, and
various bureaucracies proceeded without complication. Neither left-wing,
moderate, nor conservative groups offered significant resistance. Hitler had
swept everything before him. Yet some internal problems persisted. Among them,
in 1934, was one that Hitler did not wish to face: what do with Roehm and his
Brown Shirts now that they were no longer needed.

To put it plainly, in 1934, this
swashbuckling mercenary, father and drillmaster to his troops, straightforward
and tactless, simply did not grasp Germany’s political reality. Quick on the
battlefield but slow in politics, Roehm never understood Hitler’s renunciation
of insurrection in favour of a strategy of legality to consolidate his power.
Circuitous tactics in the military or political arena were beyond Roehm’s
imagination. Roehm was never able to understand why Hitler, now that he was a
chancellor, seemed so solicitous, even generous, toward the army and the ancient regime. For Roehm, unlike
Hitler, had never learned the lesson of the failed putsch of 1923: if Nazi
victory was to be achieved, it would be necessary to win the army’s support, or
at least its acquiescence. Hitler’s embrace of the tactics of apparent accommodation,
even compromise with the old order, seemed to Roehm to be a betrayal of the
original ideals of the Nazi Revolution. But it was precisely these tactics that
Hitler had to use to outmanoeuvre the barons of industry and the patricians of
the army. Hitler had been elected chancellor by the slimmest of margins. Now he
had to reassure the industrialists and army aristocrats that he could be
trusted to pursue a course of moderation and to expel the extremists within his
own party.

But Roehm kept trying to push his pet
scheme: the SA must incorporate the regular army into one powerful unified
force, under his command. It was, he felt, the only sure means of guaranteeing
the purity of the Nazi Revolution. At first the military had welcomed Roehm,
since the SA had militarised thousands of men who, because of the 1918
treaties, could not join the regular ranks. But the high command had never
countenanced the possibility that a coarse homosexual Bavarian provincial
should actually run the armed forces.General Walther von Brauchitsch, one of Roehm’s more outspoken critics,
remarked: “Re-armament is too serious and militarily important to be left to
hoodlums and homosexuals like Captain Roehm.” But as the SA grew, Brauchitsch
and other leading officers began go fear that the army might well be replaced.
To General Werner von Fritsch, commander of the regular army, it wasunthinkable that the ragged upstarts of the
SA could be anything but subordinate to the professional military men of
theReichschwehr.
(It is one of the many ironies to be found in the Third Reich’s history that
von Fritsch, who conspired to smash the SA and propel Himmler’s SS into power,
would four years later fall victim to an SS plot in which the general’s alleged
homosexuality would topple him from power.)

Above all, the Fuhrer needed a strong,
devoted fighting machine. He realised that the Reichswehr, not the SA, was its natural nucleus. Even before the
death of the aged President von Hindenburg, Hitler had made up his mind: a new
war would first subdue the decadent West; then a crusade eastward would
vanquish Russia and conquer Europe. To achieve these goals, Hitler had to
appease the Reichswehr officers, to
induce them into accepting him unconditionally as their leader. And thus a
bargain was struck: in exchange for the destruction of Roehm and the SA, the
army would swear loyalty to Hitler. This it did. Within one month after the
purge, soldiers were obliged to swear personal fealty to Hitler, not to the
German state. What the Reichswehr nobility
failed to grasp was that they had made a pact with the devil. They did not
foresee that “within less than ten years of Roehm’s murder, the SS would have
succeeded, where the SA had failed, in establishing a Party army in open
rivalry with the generals’ army…”

At the start of 1934, however, when the
deal was made, the army tried to drive Hitler into speeding up the liquidation
of their homosexual competitor. Hitler might have put off a decision for many
weeks- he often showed a surprising and, to his staff, unnerving talent for
procrastination- if events had not forced his hand. Roehm’s adversaries were
also manufacturing additional “events.”

On February 28, Hitler assembled both the
army high command and Roehm’s executive officers. He had prepared a surprise.
He announced a timetable for a new European war. Both groups were stunned.
Next, Hitler laid down the law: the army was to remain the only legitimate
military force. Roehm did not immediately react. Hitler then left quickly with
the army high command. Afterward, Roehm exploded:

Adolf
is rotten. He’s betraying all of us. He only goes around with reactionaries.
His old comrades aren’t good enough for him. So he brings in these East
Prussian generals. They’re the ones he pals around with now…. Adolf knows
perfectly well what I want… Not a second pot of the Kaiser’s army, made with
the same old grounds. Are we a revolution or aren’t we?...The generals are old
fogies… And guys like us have to cool our heels, when we’re burning for action…
The chance to do something really new and great, something that will turn the
world upside down- it’s a chance in a lifetime. But Hitler keeps putting me
off… He wants to inherit a ready-made army all set to go… He’ll make it
National Socialist later on, he says. But first he’s turning it over to the
Prussian generals. Where the hell is revolutionary spirit to come from
afterwards? From a bunch of old fogies who certainly aren’t going to win the
new war?

A shocked Victor Lutze reported the
outburst to Rudolf Hess, the Fuhrer’s deputy. To make things worse, a week
later Roehm gave a speech praising the valiant SA soldiers, contrasting them
with the decadent bourgeoisie and its commercial values. It was an act of
consummate folly. On April 20, Himmler and Heydrich were appointed heads of the
Gestapo, thus giving Roehm’s most implacable enemies nearly limitless powers.

On June 4, Hitler attempted to reason with
Roehm. It was to be their last discussion- only Roehm did not know it. The
talks lasted five hours. Later, witnesses testified that both men were
exhausted and angry. On one point Roehm gave in: he agreed to send the SA on
vacation in July and August. He too needed a rest: he suffered from fatigue and
neuritis. Two days later his rage got the better of him and he published
another reckless statement:“The SA is,
and will remain, the destiny of Germany.”

Meanwhile, Himmler, Heydrich, and Goring
were busy cooking up the “proof” that Hitler needed to make up his mind.
Numerous documents containing secret SA orders to start a revolution, to march
against the Fuhrer, began to pile up in Hitler’s office. Army generals found
files stamped “Secret” mysteriously appearing on their desks. Inside were lists
of officers to be liquidated after the new putsch had succeeded. Himmler and Heydrich
had to work especially hard even the man in the street might wonder how the SA
could have prepared an uprising of such magnitude when half its ranks and
almost all its leaders were on vacation.

From then on, everything conspired to drive
Hitler in one direction. When visiting President von Hindenburg, who clearly
did not have much more time to live, Hitler met General von Blomburg of the
army, who reminded him to get rid of Roehm and his ruffians. Even the fact that
Hitler flew out of Berlin to attend the wedding of a minor official played into
the hands of the SS. Now it could bombard the Fuhrer by phone with faked news
of streetfights, uprisings, and other ominous SA doings. On June 26, Roehm
received a notice that should have put him on guard: for “behaviour unworthy of
an officer,” he was being expelled from the prestigious Officers’ League. Roehm
did not let it upset his vacation plans. On June 27 or 28 he moved into the
Pension Hanselbauer on Lake Wiessee and assured his staff that Hitler would
hold a meeting with the SA leadership on July 1st. all problems
would be ironed out then.

Meanwhile, army
troops in Munich went on alert; ammunition was distributed; plans were readied
for occupying the railroad station where the SA leaders would arrive the next
morning for the Hitler-Roehm conference. And on June 28, Hitler, surrounded by
Sepp Dietrich’s bodyguards, stormed into the “Brown House” and the Night of the
Long Knives had begun.

Roehm had made it easy for Hitler to act
against him by so flagrantly flaunting his homosexuality. His unapologetic
behaviour had provided a convenient peg on which Hitler could hang a multitude
of sins. But Roehm’s sexual habits were a sideshow; they were never the real
cause of his downfall. To be sure, in addition to the charge of treason, the
homosexuality of some of the victims of the purge was offered as justification
for their deaths. Homosexuality within the SA was used by Hitler as a ploy so
that he could pose as the moral leader of the Nazi Party and the Reich. After
the purge, Hitler had a directive ready:

I
expect all SA leaders to help to preserve and strengthen the SA in its capacity
as a pure and cleanly institution. In particular, I should like every mother to
be able to allow her son to join the SA, [Nazi] Party, and Hitler Youth without
fear that he may become morally corrupted in their ranks. I therefore require
all SA commanders to take the utmost pains to ensure that offenses under
Paragraph 175 are met by immediate expulsion of the culprit from the SA and the
Party. I want to see men as SA commanders, not ludicrous monkeys.

But it was difficult to make Roehm appear
as a ludicrous monkey; it was easier to make him disappear. Thus, on July 12
Roehm’s name was ordered removed from those “Swords of Honour” that worthy SA
men had been awarded as badges of merit. The name of the “Roehm House” was
changed. All photographs of Roehm in party offices were removed and destroyed.

Neither Roehm nor his SA had ever harboured
any actual plot to upstage Hitler and the army. And it was Goebbels who had
suggested that Roehm had schemed to infiltrate the networks of power with his
homosexual cronies. Roehm was innocent of such charges. He was a master at
street fighting, but a novice at political intrigue. The tactics of stealth
were simply beyond Roehm’s skills. Nevertheless, Roehm had provided as easy a
target for his enemies as Magnus Hirschfeld. He hadno respect for his
superiors; he was blunt and tactless when voicing his opinions; and he rarely
bothered to hide his interest in muscular young men. He was the most visible
homosexual in German politics, he was a Nazi, and he was doomed.

For most observers at the time, the
elimination of Roehm and his SA was regarded either as an inner-party squabble,
as an honest attempt by the Fuhrer to create a morally respectable society, or
as a symptom of the Nazi regime’s internal weakness. Some thought that the
Roehm affair meant that the Nazi Party was so riven by unrest and factionalism
that it would not survive much longer. Only much later did the world realise
that the true significance of the purge was the legalization of crime in the
name of the state. As Karl Dietrich Bracher, one of the best informed
historians of the period, has written: “The arbitrary power of the Fuhrer was
formally turned into a principle…Murder officially sanctioned and lauded became
the norm for the smooth future annihilation of political enemies, Jews, and
`inferiors.`” Barely two weeks after the purge, Hitler, addressing the
Reichstag, declared: “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to
the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: in this hour I was
responsible for the fate of the German people. I became the supreme judge of
the German nation… Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his
hand to strike the state, then certain death is his lot!”

Ina single blow, by eliminating Roehm and
the SA, Hitler had resolved the old conflict between political and paramilitary
leadership, removed a potential and embarrassing rival, gained the support of
the generals, freed Himmler and the SS from their subordinate role, and
bolstered his own image as a tough leader capable of imposing discipline and
high moral standards on his own party. But the real meaning of the Roehm affair
escaped even seasoned observers: namely, that under Hitler wholesale murder had
become a permissible principle of state. This principle, embodied in the Roehm
purge, was to have enormous and hideous implications for contragenics of all
types – Jews, leftists, homosexuals, liberals, clergymen, Jehovah’s Witnesses.